I've long held a notion that doing exactly the opposite of what lots of math PhDs think we should do in primary and secondary school would be the right path—tak

I've long held a notion that doing exactly the opposite of what lots of math PhDs think we should do in primary and secondary school would be the right path—take math education much farther from "real math". Focus almost completely on math as a tool for solving real problems. I have a feeling the people who were going to become math majors would do so anyway, under such a system, and the rest of the kids would learn and retain more math than they in fact do with how we teach it today—"here's 6 weeks on how you solve quadratic equations, without a hint of a reason for doing this, feeling motivated yet?"